Be Careful With Free VPNs: Your Data Might Be Going to Advertisers

Free VPNs usually come with a catch. But reading the privacy policy of your provider can help you understand whether you're data will be shared with advertisers and to what extent.

What's the downside of using a free VPN service? Well, there's a good chance your data is being shared with a third-party marketing firm.

If you want to know what you're getting into, do yourself a favor and read your provider's privacy policy. That's what privacy researcher John Mason did; he recently detailed how free VPNs can farm your data out to advertisers.

"Pretty much every major VPN service you can think of is guilty, which makes me think of free VPN services as nothing more than data farms," he wrote in a Monday Technopedia post.

According to Mason, the offenders include Hotspot Shield, Hola, Betternet, and Facebook's Onavo Protect. Presumably, this is done to help fund the VPN services, but the data sharing isn't necessarily black and white, nor is it a secret.

For example, Hotspot Shield's privacy policy outlines how the free version of its VPN will serve ads that can potentially collect your device's information, like your smartphone's IMEI number. The free VPN service will also temporarily determine your "approximate (city-level) location," which will then be shared with marketers to serve relevant ads.

The data collected isn't your name, email address, or phone number, but it also isn't complete privacy either. Hola, on the other hand, can collect a great deal of personal information, according to the company's privacy policy. This can include name, email address, what web pages you've visited, how much time you've spent on them, and when. All this data can be shared with Hola's "subsidiaries [and] affiliated companies," the privacy policy says, without elaborating.

This may all sound quite creepy, but some people may not mind. PCMag recently surveyed a group of users and found that 47 percent of our readers expect VPN services to be free. The same survey found that 62 percent were willing to share personal information in order to get access to free Wi-Fi.

Ultimately, you'll have to judge whether using a free VPN is worth the privacy risks, which isn't always easy. Hotspot Shield, for instance, has tried to be upfront over what data it collects after a nonprofit accused the VPN service of secretly redirecting user traffic to advertisers.

AnchorFree, the company behind Hotspot Shield, told PCMag that it's never sold user data and stressed that it refrains from associating usernames and email addresses with your VPN activity.

"We have received multiple requests to share information by various governments over the years and have never shared anything, simply because we do not store the information (do not store user IP addresses) and thus have nothing to share," AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky said in an email.